1. Field of the Invention
The disclosures herein generally relate to log management of image processing jobs, specifically, management technology of log generation on image processing apparatuses.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's office environment, printers, facsimile machines, copy machines, and multifunction peripherals (referred to as MFPs, hereafter) which have multiple image processing functions are installed and shared via networks. As performance of computers or image processing apparatuses increase, image processing and network services executed by printers and MFPs are diversified and amount of processing data tends to increase. Therefore, by recording operations executed by image processing apparatuses in logs, it is possible to analyze executed jobs on the image processing apparatuses and to manage the image processing apparatuses.
A network environment including the above image processing apparatuses may be managed by an information processing apparatus such as a printer server, with which the image processing apparatuses may be also managed. An image processing apparatus may have different inherent functions from those of ordinary information processing apparatuses such as personal computers. Although the image processing apparatus provides similar functions to those of information processing apparatuses, if hardware resources of the image processing apparatus are used without limits for ordinary information processing jobs or storage purposes, it may adversely affect to image processing jobs, in such a way that stable quality of the image processing jobs may not be offered in a long run.
Considering inherent functions of image processing apparatuses, storage resources of the image processing apparatuses should be used for preservation of image data or image processing jobs, rather than log recording. On the other hand, if an image processing apparatus does not leave logs at all, it is inconvenient when functional failures occur or communication management is required. An image processing apparatus may be different from ordinary information processing apparatuses in that an image processing apparatus has highly frequent operations and infrequent operations depending on types of image processing apparatuses. An image processing apparatus may also have highly security-sensitive operations and security-insensitive operations. Therefore, for an image processing apparatus, it is important to save logs for operations which may be peculiar to the image processing apparatus, or may correspond to certain specified conditions, because the logs can be utilized to save resources, for improvement of service quality, for analysis of cause of failures, or for recording a history of illegal accesses.
Taking the above points into account, techniques to accumulate logs on image processing apparatuses have been proposed. For example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-140111 (patent document 1) discloses an equipment management system that monitors status of equipment, which provides a log collecting section to collect logs recording various operational histories in the equipment. Also, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2002-283683 (patent document 2) discloses an image output device to manage hardware information and control information which includes communication messages between control software modules to indicate internal status changes for efficient analysis of failures or for debugging. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-239973 (patent document 3) discloses an image processing apparatus which sends a history of copying jobs to a server. Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2004-5233 (patent document 4) discloses an information management server to manage operational status of clients using the server.
The equipment management system disclosed in the patent document 1 records specified parts of logs according to predetermined methods defined for types of logs collected by the collecting section. But the equipment management system does not generate logs associated with contents of image processing jobs, and does not deal with setting limits to an amount of log data. Also, the patent document 2 describes log generation in terms of unified management of histories of software and hardware operations, but it does not generate logs associated with contents of image processing jobs. Moreover, the patent document 3 and 4 do not deal with controlling log accumulation in the image processing apparatus according to contents of operations.